I turned to my right and started up the slope. Zombies appeared from the brush. I turned right again to backtrack. More zombies.
I was penned against the house. Time to escape.
I chose a wide gap between two zombies. I tore into a sprint. They would never catch me.
The sound of more engines echoed from beyond the rise. A machine with four tires bounded to my right. A similar machine bounded to my left. The zombie riders were the large, well-fed hunters from the restaurant.
I couldn’t outrun these two. I spun around to find another way to escape.
A female zombie dove for me. She moved fast and clasped my left hind leg.
I landed on my side, snarling. I snapped at her wrist, severing the hand with one bite. The taste of rotted meat and bitter metals gagged me.
Another hand clutched my fur at the shoulders. Another grabbed my tail.
I scratched and snapped at the zombies. I’d tear apart one hand and another would take its place.
A zombie stabbed me with the stumps of his shredded wrists. He bit my left forepaw and clamped hard.
I ignored the hands clutching me and tore at this zombie’s throat. I chewed through his neck. Zombie yuck flowed into my mouth and I let go, shaking my head, hacking and overcome with nausea.
The zombie’s head remained locked onto my paw like a giant tick.
Zombies piled on top of me, hands gripping fur, legs, and tail.
I howled in fury. I pushed from the ground to shake the zombies off.
The zombies clinging around my neck suddenly let go. This was my chance to break free.
The female zombie in the long blouse and tall boots stood in front of me. She held the loop of a large metal cable. She lassoed my head and yanked hard. The loop bit into my neck, snagging fur and skin.
Hands clutched my legs and tail and pulled with renewed strength. More zombies joined the female zombie. They grabbed the cable and stretched my neck.
The more I struggled, the harder all the zombies held firm. The bones in my neck began to crack.
I fought the pain but unless I stopped resisting, the zombies were going to pull my head off.
I relaxed and hoped they’d do the same.
The zombies quit pulling but they held on to me.
Everyone knew what happened.
I had surrendered.
CHAPTER 37
The zombies carried me around the house. They climbed the stairs to the platform in front. The female zombie ran the cable through a metal cage on the platform. She dragged me inside.
When they’d pushed me into the cage, the door was shut. The female zombie made the cable loop slack and slipped it free.
Zombies stood around me, their eyes empty of life. I smacked my mouth to clean the foul taste from my tongue. I couldn’t believe that these simple, disgusting creatures had captured me.
I studied the wire cage. A real wolf could bend the metal door apart and rip it loose. As a supernatural I should be free without much trouble.
I growled at my captors. However nasty they tasted, I was going to rip the lot of them into pieces.
My neck and legs were stiff and clumsy with pain. Every ache told me how much I was going to enjoy destroying these zombies.
Cowboy zombie poked me with a long, smooth club. I snapped at the club and crunched it to pieces. He staggered from the cage, still grasping the other end of the club.
I flexed my shoulders and stretched my legs to ready myself. I raised my tail in alpha defiance and backed up to lunge.
An electric jolt punched along my spine. I jumped forward, and when my muzzle touched the metal door, another electric jolt snapped though my body.
I backed into the middle of the cage, surprised and worried.
The zombies made a gasping ghaw, ghaw—flinging spit from their disgusting mouths—that was as close as they could manage to a laugh.
What had happened? I looked around. A second cable connected the cage to the house. When I had touched the wires, that was when the electricity had gone through me.
The electric shock was too much even for my supernatural powers. One bite on the wires and I’d be flung on the floor, paralyzed from the electricity. How could these stupid creatures be so clever?
I paced in a tight circle within the cage. Barren ground and rocks surrounded the deck down to the gulch. Rabbitbrush and juniper grew around the boulders sticking out from the surrounding hills.
A layer of fresh smells wove through the zombie stink. Animals on the move: mice, hares, doves in flight. And the scent of morning pollen.
Morning.
The skies to the east faded to lighter blue. Yellow light touched the summit of the big mountain.
The dawn was coming.
And I was out here in the open in this cage.
I stared to the eastern horizon. When the sun made its appearance, its rays would burn me to ashes.
I growled in frustration and fear. I barked and howled. I circled left, then right.
The zombies stepped closer, lifting axes and clubs with nails in them.
One by one, the stars twinkled for the last time and disappeared into the gathering light.
The sky to the east flashed green and became yellow. It would be light soon and then the sun, the great destroyer of vampire flesh, would take me.
CHAPTER 38
If I had no way to escape as a wolf, I’d do it as a vampire.
I lay on the plywood and tucked my legs close. The trick during transmutation would be keeping my writhing body from touching the electrified cage.
I cleared my thoughts of fear and let my mind expand into the stillness. The transformation came to me like water filling an empty shell.
A great force pulled from the inside of my skull to flatten my snout. My leg and arm bones felt like they were crushed by enormous stones. My senses were smothered by a storm of pain. Fur receded into skin and my flesh burned with the sensation of being dragged through smoldering brush. My paws molded themselves back into hands and feet in agonizing spasms.
The pain lifted and for an instant my mind was a smooth pool devoid of thought. My senses had turned dull and the complex smells simple. Staring into the landscape, my mind clutched at the names and purposes of the objects. A wire cage that rested on a wooden deck. Juniper. Rocks.
Zombies.
Someone clapped. A man cheered, “Very good.”
My muscles throbbed. My joints unfolded like they were breaking through glue.
I drew onto my naked butt and sat on the plywood sheet, careful not to touch the wire grid. I turned toward the clapping.
A red aura surrounded the man who stood between the house and me. His psychic shroud undulated with pleasure and the fuzzy, sparkling penumbra betrayed his curiosity.
He had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack. A fleece sweater covered the top of a white lab coat.
His proud jaw and the cowlick curling over his forehead made him appear like the superhero in a comic book. Only we weren’t in any comic book and he was no superhero.
He crouched beside my cage.
I focused my gaze into his. I’d zap him and order him to let me out.
His irises opened like the apertures on a camera lens. Usually the irises pop wide as fast as a bubble bursting. His aura brightened, but it didn’t blaze as I expected.
My hypnosis powers were weak.
The man’s expression went blank. He staggered from the cage.
Cowboy zombie grasped his arm and pulled him away. Why did the zombie protect this man? Was he their master? The reanimator?
The man gave his head a groggy shake. He rubbed color back into his face. Snakes of malice lashed from his aura. His forehead wadded with deep furrows of anger. He motioned toward cowboy zombie and beckoned for the club.
The man took the club and smacked it across the cage. “What the hell did you do to me?”
The cage rattled. I feared the wires would snap loose and shock me.
I coul
dn’t break free. I couldn’t hypnotize him. I was trapped.
The man eased the club through the wire grid. “What the hell are you?”
I was certain he was going to jab me with the club, and when he did, I’d shove it back into his chest.
Instead the man wedged the club in the grid and tipped the cage. I slid across the plywood toward the electrified wires.
I grabbed in panic for the plywood sheet to arrest myself. My fingers touched the wires under the plywood, and the next instant, blasts of mule-kick pain shot up each arm and exploded in my armpits.
My hands tore from the wires and I tumbled backward against the grid.
The sensation was like getting impaled on a red-hot iron bar. Every synapse fired between every cell, and the universe within my head was scorched of everything but pain.
The cage rocked back and settled on its bottom. I curled on the plywood to save myself.
The man levered the cage again, and again I fell against the wire grid.
For the next minute I lived inside a lightning bolt, my being consumed with white pain, every thought obliterated by a tumbling fire that wracked my body.
The pain abated, like the crackling embers of a dying fire. I smelled burnt flesh—my own. My eyes gradually came into focus. Wisps of smoke drifted by my face.
I lay on my side in a clenched fetal position. My kundalini noir trembled, exhausted by the ordeal.
The man slapped the club against the cage. “More?”
I couldn’t speak. I put my hand against my face—my numb fingers were hard as icicles—and tried to force my mouth to move. My lips were rubbery and cold like those of a dead fish.
He yelled, “You do that hypnosis thing again and I’ll fry you like sausage. You understand?”
I pulled from a deep reserve and the effort to speak was like climbing out of a crevasse. “Yes, I understand. No more, please.”
“Please?” His aura smoothed. “Don’t expect a ‘you’re welcome.’”
I wanted a sip of warm blood. I wanted a ticket home. I wanted…I wanted…
The morning light on Ghoul Mountain inched down the summit. The last of the eastern stars disappeared into the cerulean blue.
The dawn approached.
I wanted not to die.
CHAPTER 39
I turned to the man. “Take me inside.”
“Why?”
“Please, take me inside.”
He tapped the club against the wooden deck. “Tell me why.”
The light on Ghoul Mountain broadened and lengthened like a pale tongue. My kundalini noir rolled and bucked in apprehension.
The man knew too much as it was. He’d seen me transform from a wolf. I didn’t want to tell him I was a vampire. I didn’t want to confess my greatest fear and weakness—the rays of the morning sun.
The man scanned the terrain. “What is it? All of a sudden you forgot about my shock therapy. What are you afraid of?”
“I can’t…can’t…”
“Can’t what? Tell me?” The man swung the club like a baton. “I think we’ve established that you’re going to do whatever the hell I tell you. I got all morning and apparently you don’t.”
The light on Ghoul Mountain was halfway down its side. My kundalini noir coiled in desperation. I couldn’t betray the Araneum. “No, please, you don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand. I’m an intelligent man. Shouldn’t be hard.”
I could lift the plywood floor and hide behind it. But the electric grid would shock me and I’d thrash around, burning, to the amusement of this demented bastard.
The morning light slanted across Ghoul Mountain.
The dread of annihilation made me feel the flames licking my skin. My mind clawed for ideas to escape but there was only one.
I cried out: “It’s the morning light.”
The man turned his face toward Ghoul Mountain. His eyes became twin shiny disks, as yellow and menacing as the sun about to destroy me.
He pointed to the east. “The sun?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
“The morning light?”
“Yes,” I yelled again, the word shooting from my throat.
“What’s so dangerous about it?”
Moments ago, electric pain had stripped me of everything but the ferocious touch of its agonizing sting. Now fear, the fear of being roasted into nothingness, the absolute and complete destruction of Felix Gomez, lay waste to every thought but one: Survival.
I let cowardice splash over me with a filth that I readily gulped to stay alive. “The morning sun destroys us.”
“Us who?”
“Us vampires.”
The man looked stunned. “Vampires?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“No shit,” he replied. “You are a vampire?”
“Yes.” My throat hurt from the scream.
Sunlight reached the bottom of Ghoul Mountain and marched into Deadman’s Gulch.
The man rapped the club against the deck. He smiled triumphantly. “They said I was crazy for my studies in reanimation.”
He was the reanimator.
“Look at what I’ve done.” He pointed the club at his mob of zombies and then to me. “I’ve opened the door to a world beyond death and see what else I’ve found. A vampire.”
“Please, take me inside.” I saw myself a pathetic sniveling coward, helpless to do anything but betray my kind. My kundalini noir lay in a circle, head to tail, opened its mouth, and began eating itself. My strength emptied out a gash in my psyche.
“Now that I know this, why should I take you inside?” the reanimator asked. “You said us, meaning more vampires. I caught you; I can catch them. I might learn a very interesting lesson by watching what the sun does to you.”
The echo started.
Felix…ix…ix.
Phaedra’s face bloomed before me.
The echo ricocheted in my brain and my spine quivered.
What did she want? Was this a warning? Too late, I was already in deep, deep shit.
The echo grew loud. A trembling continued down my spine.
Not now, for God’s sake.
I grasped the plywood board and pulled myself into a ball. In a second, that psychic noise would have me thrashing against the inside of the electrified cage.
My psychic column vibrated. My vision blurred. I shut my eyes tight and got ready for the worst.
The vibration suddenly stopped. The echo halted, more abruptly than it ever had. I opened my eyes.
The man set his hands on his knees and stared in amazement. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
At the moment, everything. “Take me inside,” I whispered.
The man stood. “Not until you talk.”
A zombie brought a camcorder. Unlike the other revenants, his clothes—clean white lab coat, black trousers, and dress shoes—were well-kept and neatly pressed. He was the one I’d seen on the porch last night. Aside from the gummy smears around his lifeless eyes, he looked like a service technician in an ad for Mercedes-Benz.
The reanimator took the camcorder and aimed it at me. The pale triangle of Ghoul Mountain reflected in its lens.
“Smile for YouTube. Time’s running out.”
I recoiled at the image of the white rays of the sun lapping my skin and the sizzling flesh turning into smoke. “I’ll tell you everything.”
He lowered the camcorder. “Such as?”
“Everything. Vampires. The world of the supernatural.” The dam of self-restraint had broken, and I would jettison every promise and secret in trade for one more day undead.
The reanimator handed the camcorder to lab coat zombie. “Then we’ll talk. After all, there will be another sunrise.”
CHAPTER 40
Zombies slipped poles through the wire grid of the cage and lifted. They carried me sedan-chair style while lab coat zombie tended the electric power cable attached to the cage.
I swayed on the plywood sheet, vacant eyed, defeat
ed and broken. I, Felix Gomez, combat veteran, vampire detective, had turned yellow to save his hide.
All those stories I’ve heard of defiant heroes burned through my memory and singed me. They had stared into oblivion and were given a choice. Treachery or death. They had chosen death.
I had chosen treachery. All the heroics in my life meant nothing.
We entered the porch door. Cowboy zombie stumbled at the threshold and the cage tipped. I fell against the wire grid and, as I cried out, scrambled to center myself on the plywood.
Cowboy zombie leered at me over his shoulder. “Ghaw. Ghaw.”
This part of the house was at one time the living room. Most of the walls had been knocked out. Thick dirty drapes covered the floor-to-ceiling windows. Cables and tubes snaked across the floor and hung from the ceiling like the vines of a grotesque plant growing out of control. The humid air was thick with the odor of benzene and formaldehyde. It looked like the lab in a straight-to-video horror movie—with me as the starring victim.
Shelves stood along two of the adjacent walls. Bubbles pumped through dozens of glass jars and aquariums on the shelves. Human parts floated inside the cloudy solutions. A blood transfusion machine sat on a narrow table. The machine rocked back and forth, pumping blood from a dismembered torso in a tub and into a plastic bag warming in a Crock-Pot.
The zombies took me to the far end of the room next to a heavy wooden door mounted on a steel pipe frame. The door had been fashioned into a table. Lab coat zombie donned a pair of oven mitts and opened the door to my cage. The reanimator snapped his fingers and the zombies upended the cage.
The terror of what was about to happen made me cringe. I fell across the wire grid, the electricity sparking and burning my skin. I dropped to the floor, jerking about in agony.
A sharp pain like I’d been hit with a nail gun ran through my left hand. The pain reverberated inside me and I could do nothing but squirm in helplessness.
Cowboy zombie pulled away from a red jumper cable clamp that he had pinched to the palm of my hand. Lady tall boots zombie plopped a metal cap on my head and buckled a leather chinstrap. A black jumper cable dangled from the cap.
Jailbait Zombie Page 16